The Game I Thought I Made Up for 25 Years
For roughly 25 years, I was convinced I remembered a video game that didn't exist. I couldn't remember the name, what system it was on, or even much of what you actually did in the game. What I did remember was a blonde woman appearing on screen and saying, "Is that a laser in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" That line, for whatever reason, had stayed with me since childhood. Along with it were a few vague memories of a first person game involving laser weapons, bizarre monsters and possibly dragons. I assumed it was probably from somewhere around the Genesis, Sega Saturn or original PlayStation era, but beyond that I had almost nothing to work with.
Every few years, I'd find myself thinking about it again and start searching. I'd dig through old gaming forums, Reddit, retro gaming websites, Wikipedia lists and databases of games from the 90s. I'd try every combination of search terms I could think of: 90s laser game, first person monster shooter, dragon shooter, blonde woman laser game, and plenty of much less useful variations. Nothing ever turned up. The problem was that the details I remembered were so generic that they could have described dozens of games, while the one detail I really wanted to find, that strange blonde woman and her stupid laser joke, wasn't enough to identify anything.
Eventually I started questioning the memory itself. Maybe I had combined several games together in my head. Maybe I'd seen a commercial, a magazine advertisement or somebody else playing a game and somehow remembered it as something I had played myself. Maybe it was one of those weird childhood memories that gets distorted so badly over time that there isn't really a real event left underneath it. After 25 years of searching without finding anything, it seemed entirely possible that I had spent all this time looking for a game that had never actually existed.
I even tried using AI image generation at one point. I gave it the terrible description I had been carrying around in my head and tried to see if getting something visually similar would trigger another memory. I figured maybe I had forgotten an important detail that I'd recognize if I saw it. That didn't work either, so eventually the whole thing would get pushed back into the corner of my brain until something reminded me of it again.
Then I joined a Facebook group for 90s and DOS gaming. I wasn't specifically looking for this game when I joined. I was just browsing obscure games and talking to other people who apparently have the same unhealthy fascination with old video games that I do. Eventually, after seeing people identify obscure games from ridiculously vague descriptions, I figured there was no reason not to give it another shot. I posted what little I remembered: it was a first person game, there were laser weapons, there were strange monsters and maybe dragons, and I remembered a blonde woman saying something about a laser in your pocket. I didn't expect much from it because I'd been asking variations of the same question for years.
Then somebody found it.
It took them about five minutes.
The second I saw the image, I knew it was the game. There she was, the blonde woman I'd been trying to track down for most of my adult life. The artwork, characters and strange visual style all matched the fragments that had been sitting in my memory since I was a kid. After 25 years of wondering whether I'd invented the entire thing, I finally had proof that it was real. There wasn't some elaborate explanation or a forgotten prototype that only existed on a development kit. Someone on Facebook had simply looked at my terrible description and figured it out in a few minutes.
Obviously, the next step was to actually play it.
That turned out to be almost as interesting as finding it, because I realized very quickly that I remembered almost none of the actual gameplay. The game is a bizarre first person combat experience where you're thrown into fights against some completely ridiculous creatures. You have different weapons, limited ammunition and enemies with individual body parts that can be destroyed. You aren't simply shooting a health bar until something dies either. You can blow off arms, legs, wings and heads, and figuring out what you're supposed to target is a big part of the challenge.
It's a neat idea, but the game does very little to make learning its systems easy. Different enemies react to different weapons, and wasting ammunition can put you in a bad position surprisingly quickly. My first few attempts were mostly me shooting things, running out of ammunition and wondering what the game expected me to do. Eventually I started paying closer attention and keeping track of which weapons worked against which enemies and what body parts I needed to target. Once I understood some of those rules, I started making actual progress and, for a little while, I thought I might be able to push through the entire game.
Then I started running into some of the later enemies, and whatever goodwill I'd built up began disappearing pretty quickly. Some enemies would run away and hide in areas where I couldn't properly reach them. I'd burn through ammunition trying to hit things that seemed like they should have been easy targets, while shots that looked like they should have connected simply wouldn't. Meanwhile, the timer would continue counting down while the enemy sat somewhere just outside my effective range. I kept trying, but eventually I had to admit that the game was becoming more frustrating than fun.
After spending 25 years trying to find something, it was a little disappointing to discover that the game itself wasn't particularly good.
But in a strange way, I think that's what made the whole experience worthwhile.
For all those years, this game existed in my head as this mysterious piece of my childhood. I remembered the lasers, the monsters, the blonde woman and the general feeling that I'd played some bizarre game that nobody else seemed to know about. I didn't remember the frustrating combat or the confusing mechanics or the enemies that made me want to shut the game off. My brain had kept the interesting parts and filled in everything else.
That's one of the weird things about nostalgia. When you only remember a handful of details from something you experienced as a kid, your brain has decades to build around those details. The less you remember, the easier it is to turn something ordinary into something mysterious and important. There was never really any chance the actual game was going to live up to 25 years of memories and imagination.
Still, finding it was one of the coolest gaming experiences I've had. There's something genuinely surreal about seeing an image from a game you've spent decades wondering about and instantly recognizing it. Even though the actual game turned out to be frustrating and dated, finally knowing that it existed answered a question I'd been carrying around for most of my life.
The funny thing is that I don't think I'm even disappointed that the game wasn't very good. If anything, it gives the whole story a better ending. I spent 25 years wondering whether I'd imagined the game, only to finally discover that it was real and that my childhood memory had simply made it seem much more interesting than it actually was.
I finally found the game I thought I'd made up.
It just turns out the mystery was better than the game.